I have a problem with my home network. I have a wired router with a Mint (10) machine and a Vista machine connected. A printer is connected to the Mint machine. The Mint machine is a dual boot with Vista as well.

When both desktops are booted into Vista I can share files back and forth and print from both computers.

When one desktop is booted into Mint I can see the Vista machine and (after some legwork) share files from it. The Vista machine pretends not to see the printer in the network and sharing center, but I can actually print from it. The Vista machine cannot see the Mint computer in the network and sharing center, but if I go to the search bar and type the ip address and computer name I can access files on it.

How do I get Vista to see the Mint computer on the network without having to type in the ip address manually each time I want to look for a file? Thanks in advance.

After I ran "sudo smbpasswd -a username" and set up a samba password I could see something on Vista, but it calls it "unknown device" and cannot access it. I do not have smbfs installed. Do I need this?

EDIT:Installed smbfs and does not seem to have changed anything even after restarting smbd and nmbd.

I have never seen the "unknown device" error message - at least in connection with samba - before. When I have time I'll look at the Windows forums and see what that means in SMB. IT's possible that this is some weird variation of a nebios name resolution problem that can happen when Windows has a hyperactive antivirus or firewall running. You might want to disable all those temporarily just to see if you can browse to the share.

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reodineli wrote:The Vista apparatus cannot see the Mint computer in the arrangement and administration center, but if you can go to the seek bar and blazon the ip abode and computer name can admission files on it.

I'm not sure I completely understand your statement, but I think you're restating my problem. Vista does not recognize the Mint computer, but I can access files on the Mint computer from the Vista computer by going to the ip address of the Mint computer or by setting up my Mint hard drive as a network drive in Vista. I'd rather it just work as a LAN though, which is the problem I still have.

The one time I needed my girlfriend's pc (Linux Mint 11) and the home theater pc (Vista) to link together, I encountered the same problem. It turns out that some linux distros tend to make long computer names. For *nix machines, this is acceptable. For Windows, this usually exceeds the character limit that Windows imposes on computer names. My suggestion is to change the computer name on the Linux Mint pc to one that is less than 16 characters.

Basically, if your Linux Mint pc name looks like "computer-22f3ef-32ef443g", it's going to show up as unknown device on the Windows network map. Shave it down to "computer-22f3ef", and it'll be recognized.

oops.... I must have missed that post. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been so redundant. With that said, I don't think Vista/7 relies on netbios for lan networking. This is an old protocal which potentially predates Windows 2K, at least. It's not enough to change the netbios string in smb.conf. You have to change your hostname.

It will display your current host name, If it doesn't match the netbios string you set in smb.conf, that's the root of your problem. Now it gets interesting. To edit the host name, you have to edit the /etc/hostname file. To do this with root privilages type this:

Ok.... So, I looked up netbios on the net and saw that it's still an active component in windows networking. I even disabled it to see if my girlfriend's pc disappears from the network window, on my Vista pc. It does. The only other things I did different from the default smb.conf are:

1) I changed the workgroup string because I use a custom name on all of my windows machines. Just for giggles, it wouldn't be a bad idea to double check that the workgroup name in your smb.conf matches your windows workgroup name.

2) I changed the security string from "user" to "share". This way, I don't need a username and password to access Linux shares. This shouldn't be important to you, since you haven't even reached this point.

Beyond all of this, I may not have enough information on your network layout to understand why it's not working for you.

I'm still around guys, I had just given up on this. After seeing your replies a looked into it a little more and found a tutorial that made the point that if the workgroup and netbios names are not all capitals in the smb.conf then it may cause problems. Mine were not all caps, so I changed that and now Vista sees my Mint box and Mint sees my Vista box no problem. Sharing files and printers like gangbusters. I do have to start nmbd manually with every reboot though, which is annoying. Thanks for your help.